Category: Getting in Touch

I have let so many thoughts and feelings go bye that I think I have lost the touch. How do you know when giving up is a good thing or actually on the way to doing a better thing? It all depends on why.

I learned to give up half-way to some landing place from a family that trampled on my ideas and behavior as soon as they heard or observed them. I learned to avoid their hatred by giving a up first. I maintain my connection to these rejecting folk by doing to myself what they would do.

So getting on with things in my world of doing: what is my next to do thing after writing this piece. I want to look into how to build a garden on my apartment building roof. Can the place afford it? How much will a large garden cost? How much will it save in electric power for the building to cool itself in summer, heat in winter? Imagine how good it will feel to sit beneath parasols in summer; the pleasure of gardening and selling the vegetables or eating them. Imagine the joy of creating something that lives.

What is first on your list? If you have no list, dive into your imagination and do whatever comes up. No quitting now. We are not caring about whether the idea is bad or good. Do not be afraid of being a wild youth again or for the first time. Remember how Alice met the Red Queen after eating the magic mushrooms which gave or took away height. We all can grow or shrink that way.

It’s all a game. The game of life.No winners and no losers. Just the need to stretch in all directions. Do what calls you first. Then do what calls you next. Live.

I write this to reach people whose love affairs have always turned out bad. That it happens over and over shows that it is the outcome of your repetition compulsion. The repetition compulsion is out of awareness. And probably because of this very strong. You need to understand the origin of the repetition compulsion in order to limit its power and stop enacting it commands.

Acknowledge that you are suffering in your “love affairs.” Your suffering is real. Do not regard your suffering as a sign of love. That pain equals love is a falsehood which maintains the repetition compulsion. It is the thinking of a child who needs to feel loved regardless of the parent’s abuse or disinterest.

Do not accept blame for being mistreated by the one you love. Learning how to do something your lover would like should not be induced by their hating you and your reactive shame. Punishing you for not measuring up shows they hate themselves for the same thing and are passing it onto you.

Open your Pandora’s box of secret knowledge. Find the memory and feelings of early childhood, so many kinds of abuse received and so little of love and pleasure. Notice that the guilt you find there that is with you still.

Know that your inner child repeats hurtful relationships in order to “get it right this time.” The child needs to believe that love is waiting. There is no end to their experience of trying and failing.

Step into the social unknown. Meet people who do not act like terrified slaves or tyrannical parents. Do not act that way yourself. See who is attracted to the open, softer you.

Know if the ones you meet are narcissists from their self-centered behavior. Feel OK about moving away from them. Politely tell them that the “chemistry is not right.” This is your chance to say “no” to the control of your “inner child,” the negative part of yourself. You cannot say “yes” to Mr./Ms. Right until you can say “no” to Mr./Ms. Wrong.

Do not chase after anyone who seems disinterested. Tell yourself no holding on when there’s nothing to hold onto. Fight the urge whenever it appears. No more time for imaginary lovers.

Do not pretend to feel love. Offering fake love is a bribe for real love that cannot come. The receiver senses that what you claim is untrue and their love, in response to yours, or naturally to them, may be fake as well. They also may be love pretenders. Real love makes you feel warm and happy. You no longer are alone. The person who seeks your love wears their heart on their sleeve. No need to imagine it.

The Indian nations at the Sioux Standing Rock anti – DPL encampment, state they are there to peacefully protect the water. They call water the basis of life which it is. Astronomers scan the universe for signs of water. Unstated and possibly not admitted, we all seek the source of life from which we come and the planets are our nearest destination.

The Missouri River which flows into the Mississippi is the water that the DPL wants its pipe to cross. Currently, the number of planned crossings is 5. This company which claims safety has had at least 200 recent pipe breaks. These breaks leak oil in huge quantities. Underwater leaking is hard at first to see and harder to fix. Newspapers claim that the Sioux are concerned about drinking water for their reservation. This representation is dismissive. It eliminates the 18 million mostly non-Indians who live downstream.

There is an American Indian saying that one should look into consequences of one’s action up to the 7th generation. The 7th generation is not to be taken literally. It means for the good of all who follow. This expresses the meaning of the Commons, land owned by none and there for all.

To dig up what can be sold and which seriously pollutes is a short-sighted and extremely destructive philosophy. The natural gas liked by Hillary stimulates earthquakes. The frequently stated, even by Obama, “clean coal” is never is clean. People who breathe dust-polluted air develop asthma and other diseases. Miners develop pneumoconiosis from coal dust which destroys their lungs. People living downhill from the mines drink from sludge-polluted streams, their homes beset by landslides. To the corporate mind, these consequences are unintended so do not count. What counts is, “how much are you making?”

Companies fear they will be tossed aside if we switch to biodegradable sources of power: to sun and wind and geothermal and waves, so are fighting to keep control. They know that a switch to biodegradable renders their not yet extracted produce worthless. They get congress to endorse wars to get more of it. They pay for propaganda to keep people’s allegiance to their produce: e.g. wind and sun can’t do it and other manufactured lies.

The idea of an individual or even worse, a company owning land is anti-life. Chief Leonard Crow Dog at the DPL, responded to soldier’s representative Wesley Clark, Jr’s. request for forgiveness for all the damage done to the Indians, first said, “World peace,” then said, “We don’t own the land. The land owns us.”

This is the meaning of the Commons: all life cared for, the young and the old, pure water, plants to eat, for herbal medicine for beauty, for their own sake, shading trees which create oxygen; no harm done.

We do not think this way in a society based on the profit of extraction. As long as we live in terror of our stock losing value, our lives are increasingly at risk. The 6th great extinction is happening. For the first time, the young are living shorter lives than did their parents even though they have more “stuff.” Stuff does not create life. Stuff devours it. Being hypnotized into feeling we lack something leads us.

Instead of buying or planning to buy, especially on credit, we need to make music, to tell stories, to farm together, to share the cooking and eating as a festive event. Our current religion seems to be going to the mall. Instead, we need to care for the Commons, to make that our church.

Death is in the driver’s seat. The engine runs on money. Its destination is extinction. Many, who decide what is to be done to run our world have been bought by corporations who would pollute it. This bias extends to news carriers, similarly funded so that the severity of non-action is little heard. News on TV and radio is largely a distraction against real knowing. Who is getting a divorce, what film to see, where to eat, what insanity was lately uttered by the presidential candidate?

Corporations have no intrinsic morality despite being labeled “people” by the equally purchased Supreme Court. Their sole goal is profit. The corporate machine “wants” to drill for oil, to frack for gas (ignoring earthquakes), to carry oil great distance in pipes that leak and explode near schools and towns and drinking water. Machines are not programmed to care about the fact that the world is getting hot, hot, hot. Investors accepting the goal of selling oil want pipelines to move low-quality oil to the coast for processing and then sold to foreign investors who are selling cars which burn gas which will further heat us up.

The Standing Rock Sioux are protesting along with thousands of others, native and non-native. They carry no guns lest they be labeled dangerous and shot down. Mauling is in order. They are bitten by dogs trained to leap for the face. Their sacred sites and graveyards dug. They pray and lock their arms to machinery. They beg corporate man not to poison the River from which 20 million drink. They are less drawn to the distracting culture than city dwellers. They live with and immediately notice changes in their land. They weep.

This is unlike our president who keeps selling the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) as an opportunity for job development, the usual reason given for incursion into the land Obama says it is the best thing that could happen. Everyone, engineers, scholars, environmentalists, even his Harvard professor are begging him to face the facts and stop. The TPP represents corporations, within and outside the country, suing the US for money they could not make because the EPA has stopped them. The judges of this TPP court would be corporate lawyers whose decision cannot be disputed. The “perp” will pay the price. The country will be eaten alive by predators. No escape.

Bill McKibben of 350. org says we cannot allow another molecule of organic material to be dug up and burned. He says we have reached the point of no return. Jill Stein,power, the Green party presidential candidate speaks of a world of full employment created by a green culture, powering all with sun and wind power, geothermal difference and moving tide, and magnets, a returning to the rich life with full employment without destroying Mother Earth. The corporatized government says she is unrealistic, that it can’t happen. They designate their sell-out as inevitable.

The automobile industry wants us all to drive. Trains are not given the funding to be cared for and their availability is restricted. They are not revved up as they are in Japan to be faster. The train that was supposed to have automatic braking mechanism when it went too fast around a curve, lacked it. People blamed the train. The other day a train pulled into a station full speed and smashed into a wall. The report given about the accident was “no report.” No one mentioned the lack of a device to halt the train should the driver fail to comply. My guess is that money was missing to install automatic braking equipment should the driver have a heart attack, be drunk or be otherwise disabled. The train is labeled inefficient (slower than it need be) and dangerous. Automobiles get the vote.

I was thinking out of fear of losing the little we hold onto, we become fearful and aggressive. Fear is a terrible quandary, an impossible way to think your way out of a problem. I should add that those 1 % forces which are scarfing down all available comestibles including our pensions, social security (hoped for), money for schools and hospitals and health care and bridges and roads and forests and …. you get the idea, that these needy gazillionaires need an image to hide behind since the ordinary citizen wonders why they need so much. Incidentally, they need so much because they have an addition to getting. Those with the getting addiction only need one thing. They need more.

But they know better than to advertise this problem which has a hold on them so they use a ruse of terror. We have to be made afraid of this and that, of them and those…. whatever is the boogie man or woman of the day, to take our money and invest it in killer toys for which sale they make a profit. And so violence goes on and on.

But if we recognize that there is no happiness in our terror; if we recognize that only peace brings peace; if we recognize that helping others makes friends who help us back; if we realize that loving, to love and be loved is the best experience of all, then the way to go ahead is clear.

We do the thing we love best. We give and sometimes receive. We are joyous to see another’s pleasure after our being useful. We are astonished and ecstatic when someone gives us the perfect gift, the thing that we (never mentioned) but need most. They know us! Imagine that.

We need to follow the path of love and peace in order to have it. We need to say, forget it when someone or something tries to arouse our rage. One way to know if we are doing it right this time, is to see if we are having fun. Love and fun (even with tears of happiness or relief) are marching hand in hand.

Me dear friend Ian is visiting. Having him to talk to and then sleeping in my living room, in some way put me in touch with my essential self, what is meaningful to me when not overwhelmed by what I need to do next – I am on vacation.

We dream all the time, perhaps an average of 7 times a night but leap out of bed in the morning so that memory is lost. This time, I lingered with what I consider a psychological joke but now consider a message presented as a joke since little overwhelms the defenses more than humor.

A joke leaps over our fences of non-knowing. It says “look at me (or you or it) and laugh.” That’s how the truth creeps in. It’s like Alan Cohen’s song that says light enters through cracks in the wall. In my dream, I was at the beauty parlor whose worker engaged in a mighty fight to establish order in the wilderness of my hair. I should add that my family always hated my hair. It did not hang down straight as they thought it should but emerged into the light as if growing towards the sun. I now regard it as a kind of halo. But they turned my hair into an “enemy.” They brushed out the curls which only made the hair stand up straighter. They and then I spent a fortune having it straightened The workers would take a lunch or coffee break when they saw me coming. They saw my hair as a work for two clients but only getting paid for one.

So there in my dream, I am in a beauty parlor and the worker finds a turtle in my hair which seems as wild as ever. I am surprised but not displeased to see it. The turtle reminds me of hiding in a shell away from the forces that want to disrupt my ability to learn what really is going on including in people’s thought and hearts. I tell ask the worker to bring me something to put the turtle in so she finds a white plastic container which is far too small. I want to turtle to come out of its shell, extend its head and look around.

That is when I awaken.

Know and love your dreams. They are telling you something important that you have put aside, that you are ignoring or have managed to toss out of consciousness. My turtle was a symbol of what I need to deal with. My book Unloved Again is my contribution to all of us locked in childhood with unloving parents, an experience we unconsciously seek and repeat without knowing. That is because our adult is insufficiently developed to tell the difference between then and now, and to establish rules which cut the tie.

The turtle reminds me of my love for Mother Earth, of my need to help save her and all her denizens including human from the corporate agenda which condemns us to death. Have we gone mad so as not to see what is happening? Do we hide our heads in the corporate paradise of getting more things…. like a frightened child hiding its head in its mother’s skirt?

A dream tells us to live in the now. It tells us what we value. A dream comes from where our self is. We need to take it seriously in order to grow and celebrate life.

We live in a time of multiple addictions. People leap at insensitivity. No one knows the value of feeling what is going on inside. They leave treatment to the experts while personally checking out. Not feeling pain has become vastly commercial. Adds everywhere as well as from personal pushers present drugs as offering wonderful highs which turn out to be brief to be followed by terrible falls and confusion.

One uses a drug to take away the pain. But taking away our pain is a personally significant if not a life-threatening mistake. If you do not feel your pain, you are not driven to find its cause. It is like skating on thin ice wearing goggles painted black. Your pain is not the problem even though you have been taught to think it is which makes removing pain your solution. If your symptom signifies thin or broken ice, removing the flag which signals danger may cause you to fall in and drown.

It is personally dangerous taking pills not to feel your misery. As an opium drug addict, or a mixer alcohol and downers, you may end up dying. Most people blame drugs for your demise. But the real and underlying problem which led to this is that your life is horribly empty and you feel helpless. You are a family rejected or sexually abused recent or even not so recent child who knows no way out. We do not recover from such abuse alone. You lack a helpful parent, lover, friend, guidance person to take your hand, value you and help you.

Taking pills keeps the doctors, drug stores, drug factories going full swing. The drug taker supports this complex industry by being its dependent victim. How many doctors seek a cure rather than keep you in a chronically ill, pill-taking state:”… see you in 3-3-9 months. Here is your appointment.” Taking pills like Valium keeps you plodding along in a loveless marriage where you do not discuss your discontent. It keeps you indifferent to your children who hate you in its wake. It allows you to engage in anti-social behavior without feeling pangs of conscience. Once high, nothing is real.

There are plenty of alternative, non-destructive, ways to heal cancer, diabetes, M.S., AIDs, Lupus, etc.. But these are not taught in medical school largely because a pharmaceutical business cannot own the food or herbs to heal you which are natural and long present. They cannot be patented and sold at inflated prices. Not taking the natural approach leads us to take the often useless or destructive chemicals and somatic invasions that don’t cure the disease and even lead to death.

Say we have a slow-growing tumor, 10 years old and ready to grow another 10 unnoticed. It is discovered by our doctor who predicatively panics and demands we have it removed, yesterday. The operation is done taking out the tumor and nearby organs, muscles, flesh, veins, nerves. It is followed by chemotherapy via life threatening poisonous chemicals which destroy our immune system so that the cancer is sure to return. The next level of invasion called “protective,” is cutting off the adjacent organs deemed likely to be invaded like the breast. If the problem is in our prostate, radioactive “seeds” are inserted there. Can you imagine the effect this has on your body? You have fallen into the medical ditch and are unlikely to get out.

Say you are unhappy about your marriage, job and family. Do you investigate what is wrong there and what you can do about it? Do you talk to your partner? Or do you resort to pills, grass, booze, have flimsy affairs which may end the marriage? The child within your mind pleads with you to try different life experiences. The drug-oriented adult say no to this because he wants instant relief. The drug taker closes the door to change.

To all people suffering pain from any source, it ‘s possible to try a new approach and another one after that if still unsatisfied. When experiencing the wonders of an experiential and investigative life, the source of the trouble is removed and the pain goes away.

Get my book Unloved Again today! Email me directly at elangolomb@gmail.com in order to get your signed copy. Hardcover ($25 including shipping) and Paperback ($16 including shipping) versions available. Payment collected via PayPal.